Judge admits Zarate tapes as evidence

The prosecution can show a Morris County jury two videotapes of a Randolph man coolly describing how he killed and dismembered his 16-year-old neighbor, a judge ruled yesterday.

Superior Court Judge Salem Ahto found that Jonathan Zarate, 21, gave voluntary statements to police three years ago, and that his constitutional rights against self-incrimination were not violated.

Ahto rejected the defense claim that Zarate was naive and overwhelmed by police pointing guns at him when he was caught with his brother and another teen trying to dump a trunk containing Jennifer Parks' body off a Rutherford bridge into the Passaic River. The judge also found police did nothing wrong by not videotaping their entire encounter with Zarate because the law at the time didn't require it.

"He was treated with utmost fairness," Ahto concluded. Six times over 21 hours, police told Zarate his rights to remain silent and to have an attorney.

Morris County Executive Assistant Prosecutor Robert Lane became incensed by defense attorney Richard Mazawey describing the 8-by-8-foot interview room at the Rutherford police department as "inhumane."

"Is that ironic, to say the least?" Lane asked.

In the recorded statements to police, Zarate matter-of-factly detailed the July 30, 2005, slaying in his Randolph home. In one, he is holding a Snickers bar and swiveling back and forth in a chair while describing the brutal attack on Parks.

Zarate said he invited Parks over after they had been sending each other instant messages for about two hours. They watched television and kissed, but then at about 2:40 a.m., he claims she began bad-mouthing his younger brother, James, whom Parks had gotten in trouble three years earlier for bullying her.

Jonathan Zarate began punching her face and then beating her with a metal pole. To stop her screams, he put a bandanna around his fist and stuffed it down in her mouth. Then, he got a serrated knife from the kitchen and stabbed her four times.

In the first videotape with investigators from Bergen County, Zarate said he wasn't sure if she was conscious when he stabbed her, but in a subsequent interview with a Morris County investigator, he said she was still alive when he stabbed her in the mouth, so he cut her neck.

Prosecutors believe James Zarate, now 17, helped his brother kill Parks, cut off her legs and then stuff her body into a steamer trunk and put her legs in trash bags. Jonathan Zarate initially claimed his brother was unaware of the trunk's contents, but in the second interview said he confided to his brother that he had killed the Randolph High School sophomore. James Zarate will be tried separately.

Police say they left her body in the back of their father's Jeep Cherokee. Parks' parents reported her missing, and when an officer canvassing the neighborhood questioned Zarate, he said he hadn't seen her since July 28.

"She was 20 yards away in a casket he had prepared for her," Lane said.

The Zarate brothers went to a party at a Florham Park hotel that night. They later took the Jeep and picked up a friend in Clifton and then drove to the bridge in Rutherford.

When two Secaucus police officers caught them trying to hoist the trunk off the bridge about 2:45 a.m. on July 31, 2005, Jonathan Zarate apologized for trying to dump garbage. After a detective saw blood on the trunk and what appeared to be a human back, Zarate admitted a body was inside.

At Rutherford police headquarters, he claimed he came across her dismembered body. When told that story was laughable, he admitted killing her.

Mazawey, Zarate's defense attorney, is pursuing a diminished capacity defense, contending Zarate had smoked PCP, had an obsessive-compulsive disorder and anger issues, and was hallucinating when he killed her. However, Ahto said yesterday he heard no evidence Zarate was intoxicated.

Margaret McHugh can be reached at mmchugh@starledger.com or (973) 539-7119.